20080513 : Forked this log into its own News entry. I'll keep rolling the date forward as I make updates. This will doubtless annoy a few of you who check ATC through RSS, but them's the breaks.
Since it's going to take nine billion years (internet time) to produce, this is what passes for updates until pages resume.
20080507 : File started. Took the base set of walls, cleaned a few things up (and reworked a few), added doors for the suit locker and bathroom, textured the doors and the door interface panels, modeled the escape pod hatch (still have to texture it) and ejected about forty megs of unnecessary geometry from the file (central corridor, cargo transfer lock, wardrobe, etc - oddly enough, max stopped crashing and screaming bloody murder about how the file might be corrupt every time it was saved after that happened...). The rec area is now primed and ready for the serious heavy lifting, which will begin early next week. I'd start, like, now, but I've got company and an air show (weather permitting?) this weekend, so.
20080512 : Mapped the escape pod hatch door - which I'll probably need to remap before I'm done. It looks great, but there's only so much rust and corrosion you can have on a ship before people start thinking "how is this thing still in the air?!". Started work on the i/o for the bathroom, which is taking much longer than expected. Odds are that finishing this bit alone will eat up most of tomorrow. It's a bit depressing, given that I'm spending over a dozen hours on one relatively tiny section of wall.... but that's how these things go.
20080513 : Hauled ass. The "plumbing cabinet" is done and has its light added in. The plumbing has been extended aft, below and above deck, and the pipes have been covered. This formed the first chunk of the starboard deck of the rec area - the rest of that section of deck followed immediately after. It's been textured and still needs some geometry detailing - after I get that done, the first order of business tomorrow will be extending all of this over to cover the port deck. I hatehatehate extending existing texture maps to cover new geometry, but in this case, it covers an extremely large chunk of deck, which I'll be building on throughout the rest of the environment... so while I'm not looking forward to it, I'm definitely looking forward to it being done!
20080514 : Deck plating is done. Small parts of the ceiling are done, as well as a couple of bits of wall. The goal for tomorrow is to get the hull sections between the central corridor blast door and the rec area proper completed.
20070517 : Deck plating is still done. Bits of the ceiling are slightly more done. The walls to the port and starboard of the forward blast door are now finished. Next up is the ceiling - which for how I want to do this environment, means doing a "hole punch" lighting test to see how things are going to work. It also means a lot of long, boring test renders - which means plenty of time for TWEWY. And the first glimpse of this thing for you guys. Floor and a couple of walls, still missing a lot of major odds and ends:
20080520 : Lighting tests continue to crawl along. I have more Day Job than usual on my plate and the recent spate of chilly weather combined with my penchant for cargo shorts has made me some kind of sick. Fever chills plus clammy 40° weather? It's a kind of suck, I tell you. The "hole punch" didn't quite work out as expected - the result is more lights than I'd like, but also a lot more control and a higher quality than I've built into previous environments. The central chunk of ceiling is base modeled, and I've worked out a lot of the lighting quirks that were MURDERING bridge renders. This takes the edge off of the fact that geometry is at most 20% complete. Another edge-taker-offer is rec area design status - this thing is actually done on paper... another couple of weeks of hacking at geometry should do the trick.
20080521 : The center ceiling is completely finished (hooray for pipes!), and the lighting fixtures are in place on the port and starboard - finishing that up will have to wait until the bulkheads are done. The ceiling's been built outwards just a bit, and everything is looking pretty nice. The area around the cargo transfer hatch has been detailed (enough to warrant a re-render of panel one of this page before anything new comes along) and I've filled in the usual per-compartment allotment of patch kits and environmental controls. Since I'm already running into texturing limitations, I've decided to cheap out on the walls and go with the same style of "carpeting" used on the bridge. I'd go with a flat color, but it's turned out that adding a bit of noise goes a long way to eliminating the banding problem I've grumped about in the past. Bulkheads are next on the list, then the starboard detailing - crates, grav-couch, etc. Given health and other factors, it looks like it'll be at least another two weeks before this thing's ready to go.
20080524 : Bulkheads are done, magnetic palettes are done and have crates placed on them. The big plotty crate has been modeled, the environmental controls are in, the plasma screen has been modeled (raytraced reflections seem to render faster in mental ray??), and I'm down to the grav couch, table, table hangy thinger, and the kitchen equipment. That'll be a hell of a lot of work, but I'm over the hump and the worst is definitely behind me. Unless the worst turns out to be total geometry overload. We'll see!
20080527 : A couple of renders for you below - the first is of the environment as of the 24th and the second is current as of yesterday. Since then I've started work on the kitchenette - food lockers, microwaves, and refrigerator are done. So that section's about 2/3 complete, though I still need to make some fridge magnets to give it some color. Main lighting is essentially complete, though I'll probably have to tweak it some more before things head to production. Given how long production quality test renders are taking, this means I'm still on target for my previous completion estimate.
20080528 : The kitchenette (cunningly out of frame in the above renders) is now complete. It still needs some fridge magnets, but those can wait until everything else is done. At present, three major objects and one minor object remain. The table or the hangy thingy that goes above the table will be started later today.
20080529 : Done today : Kitchen table and the thing that hangs over it. Remaining : Port and starboard ceiling texture maps, bookshelf, and a pair of Plot Tchotchkeys. The file is over sixty megs and there's a crapload of lights, which (along with the gastronomical rendering times) is a bit distressing. On the upside, the texture package is about half that of the bridge. If the bookshelf goes as smoothly as the last few bits have, then there could be pages as early as next week.
20080531.A : IT'S FINALLY DONE. Well, damned near. A couple more lighting tests and one or two close-up checks, then dummy modeling for table contents... then! At long last! PRODUCTION RENDERS! As early as Saturday night or Sunday morning. :O
20080531.B : Panel one of 3.1.13 has been fixed. This is the only instance of the rec area that I had to fake - the plan was always to swap it out as soon as possible, and now that it is possible, it has been. There's a lot of other stuff that still needs to be fixed (like the first five pages of the chapter, for example), but that's it for 3.1.13. The rec area file has been cleaned up (which shaved about seven megs off of the document) and is now ready for dummy objects. Production renders begin tonight or tomorrow.
